Development of a HD clock with Cortex-M3 processor

In my thesis I describe the realisation of a clock made of a used hard disk. The designed device works as an intelligent analogue clock. Communicating over Bluetooth with the computer it is able to download a program which describes the appearance of the clock or synchronising the time. Beside these it has a graphical LCD display and capacitive touch buttons to realise a local user interface and a microSD card on which it stores the programs.

During the design process I got acquainted with various communication interfaces, controller types, BLDC motor control and also to the functioning and of peripheries such as capacitive touch buttons, LCD display, and microphone. To study the margins of the design I decided to build a prototype of the clock. In my thesis I describe the working and the steps of the build process. To solve the problems which occurred during the development of the prototype and to extend it with new ideas I worked out a new design. In this I used a Cortex-M3 based microcontroller which is more modern and has a higher performance. The new design also got numerous new peripheries.

In order to test the prototype I programmed the C8051F040 controller. I worked out a simple software architecture and a communication protocol which is due to the communication between the computer and the clock. In my thesis I write about the major properties of the two controllers, I describe the used peripheries and interfaces and explain the functioning of the test software and the communication protocol.